


Bringing Down the Hammerless

by oh_demoted_short_one, those_painted_wings



Category: The Shape of Water (2017)
Genre: ALL THE SPOILERS, Canon-Typical Violence, Everybody Lives, F/M, Fix-It, Gen, Other, Period-Typical Racism, Period-Typical Sexism, Torture, even Necrofingers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-08
Updated: 2018-01-08
Packaged: 2019-03-02 04:06:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,192
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13310067
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oh_demoted_short_one/pseuds/oh_demoted_short_one, https://archiveofourown.org/users/those_painted_wings/pseuds/those_painted_wings
Summary: Dmitri’s bad feeling about his “extraction” saves his life, and Fleming’s attachment to protocol gets him a broken zygomatic and a guilty conscience -- but less guilty than it might have been, otherwise.





	Bringing Down the Hammerless

**Author's Note:**

> Obviously Dmitri’s death was completely unacceptable. So have this thing.

Packing goes quickly. He doesn’t have a lot of personal possessions, so it’s the work of moments to scoop his toiletries and a change of clothes into a bag. The second dose of euthanasia goes in his breast pocket, and the Colt handgun he’d picked up after receiving the extraction call two days ago he slips into the right-side pocket of his coat. The weapon’s grip is textured, quite unlike the kitchen knife he’d hidden behind his back. It gives a more secure hold, but a more secure feeling? That’s elusive.

Dmitri closes the heavy front door without locking it. He doesn’t hear the phone ring, and as he leaves the building he doesn’t notice the men watching him from the car across the street.

 

“Get out of the car.”

Fleming, sitting in the passenger’s seat, gives Strickland a disbelieving look, “Get out of the car?”

“Did I stutter?” the agent rumbles, giving him a quelling glare.

“But this is my car!” Of all that’s happened since this man came into the Occam facility with his unbearable arrogance and his position of technical authority, this is the last thing Fleming expected. Strickland doesn’t look good; he’s sweating bullets even though it’s barely sixty degrees outside, and the smell that’s been wafting around him for the last two weeks is only getting worse. Security officers shouldn’t act alone, and Fleming would feel uncomfortable deciding to leave Strickland to his own devices in this state even if it weren’t protocol. He tells Strickland as much, and though the man makes a disgusted noise, he starts up the engine without attempting to force Fleming out of the car.

 

[ Льёт как из ведра ](https://www.omniglot.com/soundfiles/rain/rain_ru.mp3) ; his umbrella can hardly handle the downpour, even under the dubious shelter of the shed’s ramshackle roof. It seems like it’s been raining for weeks, and it feels even more ridiculous to sit on this block of cement in the wet than it did to perch there under the hot sun. 

His thoughts hover anxiously with Elissa and the Asset, wandering in circles: are they safe? Are they leaving? Have they gotten away? Are they safe? He hears the faint rumble of a car pulling up behind him. The sight of the Russians’ black sedan develops the quiver that’s been residing in the pit of his stomach into full-blown nausea. Hopefully this won’t go the way he’s anticipating. Hopefully he is not a loose end to clip. The .32 feels like lead in his hand, grip already emerging from his pocket’s opening. He pulls the concealed hammer with one hand as he flicks his flashlight on-off-on with the other.

He fires a mere moment before Kuznetsov, just barely soon enough. The bullet sighted for his heart pierces through his side. A second shot intended for his head goes through his mouth opened to shout in pain, out the side of his cheek. 

Blood in his mouth, thick, he can’t swallow. It bubbles over his lips, and he coughs. His glasses are missing, fallen to the dirt somewhere, blurring his vision even more effectively than the sheeting rain. A shape gets out of the car, Mihalkov? Sound of another shot. Mihalkov goes down, and there’s another man standing behind him. 

Strickland.

Dmitri hears himself begging. Strickland’s a machine, no mercy, a finger through the bullet hole in his mouth. He scrabbles his feet at the mud, a mad, animal reaction to ease the pain of the drag. He throws out words, and words to stop the cattle prod, stop the pain, stop it stop it. It’s raining blood.

 

The sound of a gunshot draws Fleming out of the car into the rain. His upturned collar helps not at all, and in seconds he’s soaked to the bone. Strickland emerges from the shed, and he’s… he’s dragging someone by the face. Strickland throws the someone against a pile of dirt, and the someone’s Hoffstetler. Strickland’s making Bob, the decent Dr. Hoffstetler, scream like a dying rabbit.

He grabs Strickland’s wrist as his hand rises with a snubnose revolver. Strickland twists, and for a moment the gun is aimed at Fleming himself! His heart jumps to his throat, the adrenaline makes him shout in Strickland’s face: “You crazy fuck, you can’t shoot him!”

Strickland abandons Bob, twists his body and twists his hand free. The next thing Fleming knows, he’s half-fallen, hands buried in the mud, fire up the side of his face: Strickland punched him, hit him in the face with the weight of his gun in his fist. He claps a hand to the injury instinctively, the coolness of transferred mud a momentary relief. Strickland snarls down at him, wordless, walks past him, heel scarcely missing crushing his other hand.

For a moment Fleming just sits there, stunned, but the thought intrudes -- he’ll leave me here! -- and he scrambles to his feet, slipping. Stumbles across the yard, grabs at the door-handle.

Bob’s back there, lying on the pile of dirt like a carcass, tinting the water around him red. Fleming starts to pray.

He prays for the whole drive, his body curled back into the corner of the seat, crushing himself against the car’s door. He doesn’t know any prayers for this situation, so the words that rattle through his head like a train on a trestle bridge are just begging, just the words that so many people take in vain, with complete sincerity -- oh God please God oh God please God…

Strickland parks in front of a shabby townhouse in the Colored part of town, getting out of the car without a second glance at Fleming. Paradoxically, the longer he’s absent, the tenser Fleming gets, until his fear overcomes his paralysis and he throws himself out of the confines of his car. He skirts the hood, once catching his balance and leaving a red-brown handprint on the metal, immediately streaked by the rain.

On the sidewalk, he leans against the low yard wall and tries to muster his thoughts. Strickland’s unstable, completely off the hook, has to be reported! He needs a phone. He looks up at the house -- whose house? -- just in time to see Strickland momentarily illuminated in the doorway, mutilated hand in clear relief, those dead fingers completely absent. He doesn’t close the door. He crosses the sidewalk, gets in the car, drives away. When he’s turned the corner, Fleming gasps, realising he’d been holding his breath since that first sighting.

He catches for his earlier thought. A phone, inside. General Hoyt. Report, and wash his hands of it, wash his hands of all of it. He shivers, and moves forward.

The front door opens straight onto the living room. A colored man is sitting in an armchair, looking at him. Does nothing. A colored woman, familiar looking, that’s Zelda from the cleaning staff, she’s in the kitchen, still holding a battered phone’s handpiece.

He reaches for it, and she steps back. Her expression is fury.

“I need to report him,” Fleming says, reaching again. The words come out slurred by the pain, by his rapidly swelling lip. “Where is he going?”

She shakes her head, but Fleming won’t take this, won’t let some cleaner step on the last dregs of his self-respect. He steps forward, ploys his greater height, curls his dirty hands into fists. “Tell. Me.”

She doesn’t retreat any further. She draws herself up. Her voice shakes with rage as she says, “You tell Hoyt he’s going to the docks. You make him listen, ‘cause he won’t listen to me!”

He grunts and takes the handpiece when she shakes it at him pointedly. The ancient rotary doesn’t seem to tick fast enough but the line patches through and the voice on the other end is clear enough. The General is none too happy being pulled away from a meeting at the Pentagon but he listens well when Fleming explains the situation. He doesn’t go into much detail, doesn’t mention the Soviets, because he still has sense enough to know that saying such things over an insecure line might attract a lot of bad attention. Red attention. 

Fleming relays what he saw regarding Strickland shooting a man, and drops Dr. Hoffstetler’s name. Strickland went after someone, someone he thinks has the Asset, to the canal docks, and that he’s certainly gone off his rocker because he’s sick, he tore off his own damn fingers sir!

Hoyt tells him to stay put, that he’ll handle it, but Zelda has overheard everything, and runs out of the house ranting about spies getting into trouble. He can’t let her go out there alone, with the possibility that someone might have gone looking for the men that never returned after… after what happened in the quarry. This might be his chance to save Hoffstetler,  if he’s still alive out there, if he hasn’t bled out into the sandy mud.  The man in the armchair starts to rise when she goes into the hall and puts on her coat but she gives him this look of disgust and marches out the door. The man sits back down, and stares at his hands, and doesn’t say anything when Fleming follows Zelda out.

 

The road veers momentarily in front of him and Richard jerks the wheel back to correct, tightening his one handed grip. His other hand he clasps to his chest, staunching the bleeding as he can but not giving it much thought. Really he’s not thinking much at all beyond how fucking pissed he is that this all got so far. That little silent bitch, right under his nose, stealing his Asset, and that Commie bastard helping her the whole time, no doubt. She was probably planted by the Soviets long before the project even started, to get any information she could from the facility. Who’d expect a mute orphan to be a Pinko? He hisses as his blunted fingers clench at the canal coming into view. Finally he can fix this, and Hoyt can have his damned vivisection and he can fix his teal Cadillac and move past this fucking project. Just one more thing to do, one more end to tie up. 

None of them notice him pull right up in the storm. The old man goes down like a sack of meat. By the time the creature has seen him and the girl has turned around, he’s already put a bullet in her gut. It roars like it was shot, stupid thing, and goes down beside her, three bullets in its chest, bam bam bam.

“You couldn’t just leave it alone could you, you dumb little bitch?” His vision wavers, but he sways upright again with a surge of adrenaline. He’s so close he can taste it underneath the blood and the musk of  his own rot. “You should have kept your head down, and cleaned the fucking lab. But no, you had to bleed your little heart out over a fucking creature that doesn’t even understand what’s happening to it. And now you’re going to end up like your Commie partner. You’re going to bleed out in this rain, and then I’m going to take that thing back where it belongs--what the fuck!?”

A car veers up next to him, almost ploughs him right over, would have, if he hadn’t ducked out of the way in time. It’s Hoffstetler who almost falls out of the driver’s seat. Man couldn’t even have the decency to die, the weaseling little shit, but it won’t take long to fix that -- he’s putting himself right in line for a clean shot, idiot. Strickland plants his feet, sights along his gun, pulls the trigger -- and it clicks, impotent. Fucking hell, he’s lost count of his bullets -- but he’s not so far out of it to take his eyes off the Commie while he fishes in his pocket for another round. The raw ends of his fingers rub against the rough fabric of his coat, but he doesn’t even feel them anymore. He’s winning, he’s going to get it all, he sees Hoffstetler stumble forward,  one arm pressed against the wound on his side and blood oozing in a line out of his cheek like a slug’s trail, but the man’s too far away, he’ll have one final bullet in him in a moment… 

 

He puts the car in between Strickland and the girl, and he puts himself between Strickland and the car. He knows it’s little more than a symbolic action, now. He’d seen them both go down, Elissa and the creature, but he doesn’t… he doesn’t want Strickland looking at them, hopes the last thing they saw wasn’t that awful, жадный, hungry expression. Strickland’s got his gun up, and Dmitri flinches abortively, and doesn’t die. He doesn’t have time to be surprised about that; he’s already moving forward, already too late, too slow.

He’s still not dead. The man who’d been crumpled behind Strickland is up, armed, and vengeful. Strickland falls from a blow to the back of the head, gun dropping from one hand, three cartridges rolling across the pavement out of his left pocket. The man -- Dmitri knows him, it’s the getaway driver -- doesn’t pay another moment’s attention to Strickland, but rushes past him, around the car, presumably going to Elissa’s side.

Dmitri limps forward, kicks the gun away from Strickland’s hand. It skitters across the pavement, stopping just shy of going into the water, far out of reach -- he won’t tempt fate, he’s done with that. Then he stomps on his tormentor’s undamaged hand with as much force as he can muster. The fiend rouses with a pained cry, curling up around the pain like a beast in a trap. Dmitri takes a savage, if exhausted, pleasure in seeing him writhe so pathetically.

 

The black sedan’s bulk is an illusion of privacy and protection behind Giles as he crouches at Elissa’s side. He thinks that he calls her name, he knows he starts to lift her up, stops because he can’t remember whether you’re supposed to move a gunshot victim, or how. His hands shake as he presses them over the bloody hole in her shirt. Her skin is pale, fingers slack, still loosely wrapped around her precious creature’s arm.

Suddenly a sea of lights cuts through the heavy rain, though the sedan still casts Giles and his friends’ still forms in deep shadow. He can hear the engines of heavy vehicles, many, a convoy descending the quay towards them. They’re out of time, out of options. The only way left to go is into the water…

He panics. He can’t let them have the creature, not after everything he’s done for them, not after Elissa’s given her whole self for him. He releases the pressure he’s been applying, shifts his balance, and grasps the great, heavy body by the shoulders. There’s spots floating in front of his eyes, bright blue. Giles heaves, feeling the strain in his back and shoulders, to no avail. He rocks back on his heels and pants a little, looking over his shoulder, expecting to see body-armored forms rushing around the hood and trunk of the car, any moment. There’s movement in the corner of his vision, and he looks back just in time to see a flash of light reflecting off wide-open eyes, arms reaching over Elissa, and then they both disappear, gone over the edge of the bank. The ribbons of blue he mistook for spots disappear quickly in the murky water, and the sound of the bodies’ fall is hidden by the noise of the rain and the army.

Giles sways, catching himself from falling out of his crouch by putting a hand to the pavement. It’s a little warm -- he’s touching where Elissa had been lying -- and he pats at it mindlessly, bereft.

 

He twists in the fall so that his back hits the water first, protecting his barely healed wounds and protecting her from the water’s sting. The pain in his chest is insignificant to the pain in his throat, where the fear for her sits. He can’t raise his voice through it.

The water is full of silt and tastes of unidentifiable run-off from the land, foul. Yet the expanse of it, the way his feet can kick and lift them both up and not touch the bottom feels like freedom. With that thought comes the will to summon up his lights and song; he touches the sides of her neck, lays his hands over the raised marks she seems so ashamed of. She’s nearly as much a creature of the water as he already, and his benediction lays itself easily in her, so swift, it’s as if she pulled his power out and wove the change herself. Somewhere in her unmoving body lies the want to transform.

He feels a flutter against the thin skin of his palms and lets go. He can smell her blood in the water, but the stench of it already begins to fade as he watches her take her first breath, water in her mouth, water out her gills. The tightness in his throat eases enough; he speaks a note, part question, part plea. She may breathe, she may not bleed -- she must wake up, and  _ then  _ it will be hope.

She opens her eyes. She touches the side of her neck where he had touched a moment ago, and breathes, and smiles. 

 

The man that walks through the doors to the tiny Trinidad airport from the airstrip is… haggard, to say the least. His skin is pale, in the way of someone who has recently been ill and indoors for most of their convalescence. His gait is strange, favouring one side, and a large bandage covers the lower right half of his jaw. His accent is atrocious, but he speaks clearly enough and his money is good. He books passage downriver after a fashion, plans set for three days hence and made with only the barest counsel from his guide. It is not the first time a foreigner like this man has come to town, gone into the jungles, and never been seen again. Intent purpose is in his eye.

Andrew Rogers (nee Robert Hoffstetler, nee Dmitri Papov) has had enough of flying within twelve hours of boarding his first plane in Miami. By the time he steps off the plane in La Santisima Trindad, he has decided to raft rather than jump the last 240 kilometers or so. He finds the air agreeable. Years in the southern US gave him a tolerance to humidity, and this is the “dry” season besides. The rivers are lower this time of year, without warm torrential rains to flood the banks. Hiking the remainder will be easier this way.

He clutches his pair of small bags protectively as he leaves. One contains nothing but the barest staples of scientific equipment, the other, his meager belongings, among them a half-composed letter, not yet addressed, but destined for Giles’ hands. He is eager to supply with all the basics of wilderness survival and set out. He is so close, at last, to resting free from fear.

**Author's Note:**

> Through the early stages of conceiving this fic we consistently referred to Strickland as “Necrofingers,” as neither of us could remember his name in those wee hours of the morning.


End file.
